Rush was right! Clinton is a communist!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1
  • from New York Times News Service:
  • “Government Officials offered incentives for programming”
  • “Washington: Over the past two years, the White House has reviewed some scripts and advance footage of such television shows” . . . " - under a little-known financial agreement (emphasis mine) that encourages them to include anti-drug messages in the plots of programs." -continues further-
  • !!!
      • So, as I heard it Clinton doesn’t like that pesky second amendment because “it’s outdated”. And now, it seems that first amendment is showing it’s age also. If you voted Democrat last election, feel free to take this time to unscrew the top of your head, pour the contents into the nearest toilet and flush. - MC
2

You could possibly have misrepresented the program more fully, but I don’t know how.

Here’s how it works. Broadcast TV stations, as a condition of their FCC license, have pretty much always had to run X amount of public service ads. In 1997, an additional proviso was added to require that for every 30-second anti-drug ad that the federal government purchased, the station must match it with another 30-second free ad, effectively allowing the government to buy anti-drug ads at half price. That, arguably, was an infringement on the First Amendment, but since the stations were lobbying Congress to have about $60 Billion of free spectrum thrown their way for HDTV, they were in no position to complain. (They eventually got the spectrum).

Under the new program, networks can go to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and say, “Hey! We’ve got anti-drug messages in the shows themselves! That means we shouldn’t have to give you the free ad.” And the Drug Policy people can conclude that an anti-drug message inside a show is as good or better than a paid ad, Rachael Leigh Cook’s outstanding body notwithstanding. So they give the network credit for some number of ads for each anti-drug message. The networks collectively have recovered $20 MM of ad time with the program.

Are there potential abuses the government can inflict here? You betcha. But not as many as the government can already inflict through its control of the broadcast spectrum. And not a fraction of the abuses they inflict in the War on Drugs generally.

Sorry to get so General Questions on you.

Livin’ on Tums, Vitamin E and Rogaine

3
      • It is acceding to government control, that results in favoritism. And it is whe White House, attempting to control program content directly. And it has happened before: Clinton never directly said he wanted to ban gun ownership; he just wanted to approach the whole thing rationally, add a few small requirements, make a few provisions, , , , , , , and now the administration is saying that it doesn’t want to write TV scripts, they just want to approach the whole thing rationally, you see, add a few small requirements, make a few provisions, , , , , , , - Where are all the people who squawked when George Bush got elected? - MC
  • There’s an old slogan among “liberty” nuts that if the second amendment was overturned, the first would be next.
4

Did you miss the part of the story where the networks have to request that a script be reviewed?

If anything, this program is a sop to the TV industry. They can avoid giving Congressionally mandated discounts to the federal government for anti-drug scripts that they always planned on airing anyway.

Expect the TV industry to continue its Gore-fest.

Livin’ on Tums, Vitamin E and Rogaine